Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Regarding yesterday's post (and my comment that my wife had gotten a decent
education in public schools), a reader noted the following:

... One of the saving graces of American public education that's
being progressively destroyed pretty much on principle ever since the
Department of Education was created is that it used to be heavily
decentralized, which allowed a great deal of independence in teachers to
flourish.

The principal in New Zealand I mentioned, who threw out a silly rule book so
his students could play during recess, would, I am sure, have the book thrown
at him here. But in case anyone needed examples of this problem, A. Barton
Hinkle recently wrote a piece replete with
them. (He starts with a student facing disciplinary action for possession of a
dangerous object. Said student was a girl who stopped another from "cutting" herself -- and then discarded the razor to avoid
falling afoul of her school's mindless "zero tolerance" policy on dangerous
objects.) Hinkle notes of such incidents and the fact that schools have been
"rethinking" such policies for well over a decade:

It's great that a school district here and there has second
thoughts about first-strike policies. But that doesn't solve the broader
problem, which is rooted in a bureaucratic compliance mentality. Just ask Chaz
Seale, a Texas 17-year-old who accidentally shoved a Coors into his brown-bag
lunch instead of a soda. When he realized his mistake he gave the unopened beer
to a teacher. The teacher told the principal, and the principal suspended Seale
for three days and sentenced him to two months at an alternative
school.

So, in our public schools, we're increasingly not just teaching our
kids that the real world is dangerous, but acclimating them to one that
actually is: one in which mindless bureaucrats wield unchecked power over them.
Worrisome to me is the fact that I wasn't particularly looking for an article
like Hinkle's, any more than I was the one I discussed yesterday.